Madeleine took another step, hesitating, along the new road. She leaned against the counter to ease her aching body and put back her hair to look around her at the wreck and ruin of her husband's business. She said in a faint voice: "I wonder if I could keep the pharmacy open. I used to help Jules with the accounts, I know a little about where he bought and how he kept his records. I wonder if I could--enough for the simpler things?" "You have already," said the nun, as she went away, "and the first things you have given out are bandages for your enemies. God will not forget that." Madeleine received this with an impatient shrug. She was not at all glad that her first act had been to help the suffering among her enemies. She had hated doing it, had only done it because of some confused sense of decency. She heartily wished she had not had it to do. But if it had been necessary, she would have done it again ... and yet to do it for those men who had murdered M. le Maire, so blameless and M. le Curé--so defenseless!... No, these were not the same men who lay bleeding to death in the Hospice to whom she had sent bandages. _They_ had not murdered ... as yet! Her head throbbed feverishly. She renounced again the effort to think, and thrusting all this ferment down into her subconsciousness she turned to the urgent needs of the moment. It seemed to her that she could not breathe till she had set the pharmacy as far as possible in the order Jules had left it. This feeling, imperious and intense, was her only refuge against her certainty that Jules was killed, that she would never see him again. Without an attempt to set to rights even a corner of the desolated little home, upstairs, she began toiling up and down the cellar stairs carrying back the glass jars, the pots, the boxes, and bottles and drawers. It seemed to her, in her dazed confusion, that somehow she was doing something for Jules in saving his pharmacy which he had so much cared for, that she was almost keeping him from dying by working with all her might for him there.... In the middle of the morning she went upstairs and found that Sylvie, working with Raoul, had cleared the kitchen of the worst of the rubbish. In a pot-closet under the sink there were two old saucepans which had not been stolen. Madeleine made a fire, stoically using her own broken-up furniture, and, putting a few potatoes (the last of their provisions) on to boil, sat down to nurse the hungry baby. "_Maman_ dear," said Sylvie, still in the strained whisper of the days of terror. She could not speak aloud for weeks. "_Maman_ dear," she whispered, "in the salon, in the dining-room, I wanted to try to clean it, but it is all nasty, like where animals have been."